


Flowers for a Grave

by Archaeopteryx



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Nonbinary My Unit | Byleth, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), seriously fuck gilbert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 05:55:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20887223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archaeopteryx/pseuds/Archaeopteryx
Summary: Byleth takes a moment to mourn those lost during their five years of absence, and urges Dimitri to do the same.





	Flowers for a Grave

Broken glass crunched behind them. Byleth turned their head: Dimitri stood in the entrance to the ruined greenhouse, strange in the way Byleth was too-quickly growing used to — head lowered like a bull ready to charge, shoulders and spine slack like a marionette, dragged onward by the strings of the nightmares that plagued him. 

"You and him," he said dully. "The greenhouse. If I needed to find you."

There was no question of who '_him_' meant. "He liked it here," Byleth said. A neutral enough response, but Dimitri growled.

"It was the only place anyone gave him any peace," he snapped. He stepped forward with purpose — to strike Byleth, or perhaps tear their head off — but froze, staring at nothing while his fists clenched on air. Byleth followed the line of his gaze, and bit their tongue until they tasted copper. A flower — one of _Dedue's_ flowers — had somehow survived five years exposed to the elements. In defiance of all expectation, a bright orange bloom sat atop a squat cactus.

"Curious," Byleth murmured. "I would have thought the climate too cold."

Dimitri said nothing. He had gone from 'broken marionette' to 'creaking clockwork', wound so tight he trembled with the tension. His face was even grayer than it had been, his mouth a thin, bloodless line, his eye locked on the single bloom.

"Do you want to talk about him?"

Dimitri's head whipped around. He stared at Byleth, jaw working in silence, then snapped, "To what end?"

"Mourning," said Byleth. "Gilbert moved on too quickly."

"He’s a soldier. We’re at war."

"And I am a mercenary," said Byleth. "A faithless sellsword. And such a death demands respect." Anger clipped their speech, their spine ramrod-straight. They spared a glance at Dimitri, uncertain how he would take their bitter outburst, and caught a glimpse of raised eyebrows before his face shuttered again.

"Useless," he grunted. Byleth's empty chest twinged, but anger would not serve them here — Dimitri's grief was older, but deeper by far, they had no doubt. 

"When I lost my father — "

Dimitri snorted. Byleth went on, unperturbed.

" — When I lost my father," they said again, "I found it helped to speak of him. Those who knew him as a knight shared their stories. I shared my own. The pain did not grow less, but it grew more bearable."

"Hmph."

They could not make Dimitri speak if he did not wish it. Byleth returned to their silent vigil over the ruined greenhouse. A breeze stirred the leaves with a dry, deathly rattle. Byleth drew their cloak around their shoulders. Dimitri's breath misted in the air, although the sun, now approaching midday, had blunted the edge of the morning chill. After years untended, leaves and stems ran wild, but most had browned or blackened in the Guardian Moon frost. Only that orange bloom sat, fragile and stubborn in the mountain air.

Those restoring what they could had left the greenhouse untouched, by unspoken consensus. It might be the closest thing to a grave Dedue ever got.

“Loyalty,” Dimitri spat, as if it were a curse. “We will — remember — his loyalty.”

Ah.

The words Gilbert had spoken while they all stood stunned — and then, silence broken, swept the reeling rest of them in his wake with neither breath nor pause. “There are better ways to remember him," Byleth said.

“It is all these fools understand!” Dimitri’s breath rattled in his chest. “It was not for _loyalty's_ sake that he came for me. He trusted me, and I — ” However he’d meant to end the sentence, he choked. Byleth’s stone heart dropped through their stomach.

They had suspected, but never been certain. The pair had been inseparable, certainly, but so had Edelgard and Hubert, and Byleth was reasonably sure there was no such entanglement there. Still, there had been something else between Dimitri and Dedue: the way Byleth sometimes found the two of them alone in quiet corners of the monastery; the way they would turn, startled, as if caught in some private conspiracy. The way Dimitri’s eyes tracked Dedue when they were together. The way Dedue bristled at any slight to Dimitri, even when Dimitri was not there to hear. “You loved him.”

Dimitri grunted as if struck.

“He loved you.”

Silence confirmed the cold dread in Byleth's gut.

"I'm sorry."

“The whole damn world should be sorry.” Dimitri stepped up to Byleth's shoulder — their left, his right, the eye patch turned towards them. Byleth had not heard him approach. The glass crunching earlier had been a courtesy, not an accident. That, and the tacit gesture of trust — flint and tinder to a spark of hope amidst the wreckage. Byleth gathered it close, cupped in their hands to shield it from the winds. Dimitri's lip curled over his teeth. “It owed him peace and gave him nothing but war.”

"He was a good kid," Byleth said. They huffed; the corners of their mouth twitched. "Understood the value of a moment's quiet. He was the first to make me feel welcome here."

"It was a gift of his," Dimitri said.

"It was," Byleth agreed. The fond memory faded under a mist of grief. Byleth sighed, sobered. "The world is poorer without him."

“Hmph.”

“I’ll miss him.”

Gravel scraped — Dimitri spun on his heel and loped from the greenhouse with the long-legged gait of a man used to travelling miles on foot. The heavy cloak with its boar-hide mantle fluttered behind him. Byleth watched his retreating back, then returned to their vigil, standing watch over the frost-blackened greenhouse and its lone, bright bloom. Its fragile petals trembled in the cool breeze.

“We should rebuild this place,” they said into the empty air. “Make it bloom again.”

Nothing answered. Byleth’s eyes ached, the dry burn of tears that wouldn’t shed. Days ago, it seemed, they’d stood beside that boy — gentle, shy, determined as a glacier in defense of what he loved. He’d given them flowers for their father’s grave, and never asked them to speak of what they could not explain.

“I owe you that much.”

Promise made, they turned, and followed Dimitri from the ruins.

**Author's Note:**

> man, FUCK gilbert for how he handled that.


End file.
